Science

As NASA's Dawn spacecraft gets ready to enter orbit around Ceres - the first dwarf planet visited by a satellite - mission scientists are using new images to try to understand strange and surprising features on its icy surface.

High above the spiral Milky Way, astronomers have spotted two clusters of new stars growing at the fringes of our galaxy. The discovery, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, appears to be the first such stellar cradles found outside the galactic disk.

Clostridium difficile, a bacterium that causes swelling of the colon and potentially deadly bouts of diarrhea, infects almost half a million people each year and contributes to the deaths of 29,000, according to new research.

Ticks carrying the bacterium responsible for Lyme disease are infesting Northern California's birds and may be hitching rides on them into suburban settings, according to a new University of California, Berkeley, study.